David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

I took a redeye to LAX, dozing in and out of Dramamine sleep, rented a car and drove up to Santa Barbara. Insert praise of the Creator for a June morning in California. Let there be palm trees. From my mother’s balcony, you could look down the street and see, between two oceanfront mansions, just about that much of the Pacific. “Was it wicked to make Bloody Marys?” she said as she set them down on the glass-topped table.

“We’re good,” I said. “They’re a vegetable.”

“Speaking of which”—she raised her glass—“to Phyllis. Poor thing, she’s well out of it. You know, I’m still not clear what’s supposed to happen when your uncle gets back. Will you two keep bachelors’ hall?”

“I doubt that ,” I said. “As Dad used to say, God will provide.”

“Dear heart—the weapons industry did the providing. Not that I turned my nose up at it. As you see.” She swept her hand like a queen to indicate her balcony and her slice of ocean. “Thank you for going along with my little whim, by the way. Every once in a while it just hits me what a terrible wife I was to him. I’ve calmed down.”

“I’m glad we went up there, actually. Seth brought along one of those Tibetan prayer flags.”

“Oh my. Did you hear a whirring noise underground?”

“He’s a better person than I am,” I said.

“Give him time,” she said. “I know—I’m getting grim in my old age. But the evidence does start to pile up. You remember that horrible woman next door? Who made her husband put up the crèche every year? She told us that the couple across the street was living in sin, and your father said, ‘Who isn’t?’ ”

“That was Dad,” I said.

She said, “He was such a good man. I think I used to wish he was dead.”

“Well.” I raised my glass. “Cheers. We’ve got a beautiful day.”

“They’re all beautiful days here.” Her glass stayed on the table. “Bought and paid for.”

Well, all right. I was out a thousand dollars I didn’t have, if you figured in the car and whatnot, but nothing here seemed to cry out for intervention. No piles of newspapers, no dishes in the sink, no empty bottles visible, flowers on the dining table. Her book club was reading…I forget what, you can make something up if you want. Her remorse—who doesn’t have it?—seemed manageable, and she was past the place where she could have done anything to mitigate it. If she was undeserving of mercy and bereft of grace—who isn’t?—at least now she knew the shape of her story. Whereas.

Lily has figured out this much: open the downstairs windows at night to let the cool air in, then close them in the morning and the house stays cool all day. Didn’t her father always say she had a splendid mind? While Portia, her older sister, only had a good head on her shoulders. The upstairs windows you always keep open, because of the heat-rises axiom. No, higher than an axiom: a law. No, higher still than a law: a truth. Unless truth and law rule side by side. Upon a throne of adamant. Is this not a splendid thought? She should really be writing this stuff down.

She’s in Connecticut, house-sitting for the Hagertys the first three weeks of August, with the use of their second car, and sleeping in their dead daughter’s bedroom. This is their weekend-and-summer getaway, but Marian Hagerty hates the look of air conditioners in the windows, so in August they fly to Main-à-Dieu, on the easternmost coast of Cape Breton, in a chartered seaplane, to watch the fishing-boat races. Joe Hagerty had hired Lily’s father straight out of Harvard Law—a charity case, he liked to say. This got a laugh at her father’s memorial. Everyone there knew Skip Kiernan had turned down Harry Blackmun’s offer of a clerkship.

The Hagertys’ daughter, Elena, had gone to Dalton while Lily was at Brearley, but the summer Lily turned nine, the Kiernans rented a house near Joe and Marian’s—they hadn’t yet bought their own getaway—and her father drove her over one day to play tennis with Elena on the Hagertys’ clay court. (Portia, who was twelve, chose to go to the lake with their mother.) Elena, long hair flying, had Lily panting and sweating in the first few volleys. Lily remembers, years later, doing coke with her in the bathroom at Portia’s wedding, and Elena, now with boy-length hair, possibly coming on to her. A kiss on the lips? With just the most petite dart of the tip of Elena’s tongue? She had on an electric blue dress with spaghetti straps, and when she leaned forward over the countertop, Lily saw the nipples of her small breasts. Elena’s been dead for five years now, and Lily’s found not a trace of her in her old room: nothing in the dresser drawers but flowered paper lining the bottoms, nothing in the closet but satin-padded hangers. Are the Hagertys really so sure the dead don’t mind?

In these three weeks, she will swim every day; the Hagertys’ Subaru Forester has a sticker for the recreation area at the lake. She will eat better, keep her cellphone off, go online only once a day—just in case anybody responds to the résumés she sent out—and not smoke the weed she’s brought. She will read The Custom of the Country (the others were so good), reread Mansfield Park (the only one that’s still not too girly), try again to push beyond the beginning of Adam Bede , and leaven all this with whatever she may choose, on a whim, from the Hagertys’ shelves. Won’t that be something, to have a whim. As distinct from an impulse. And every night, eleven o’clock sharp, in bed, lights out, with a movie on her laptop and a glass of something. She’s brought only a half dozen of the old usuals along, since Marian told her the video store in town was owned by “film buffs.” This got Lily picturing gay boys with toned bodies, whom she could go look at every day in their tight T-shirts. Who says the pastoral is dead?

Portia had tried to talk her out of coming here—a bad time to isolate, she’d said. She’s also confided that when she’s alone she sometimes hears their father speaking to her. But Lily needed to get away from her one-bedroom in Brooklyn Heights, which she’d rented on the now-exploded theory that neighborhood trumps space. And also, let’s admit it, to get away from Dagon, whom she’d lately been feeding Rice Krispies, and whose litter box she’d been finding herself unable to clean and refill. Renaldo, the intern she’s kept in touch with since being laid off, agreed to stay with him in return for the three weeks of air-conditioning and a shorter subway ride. On the morning she gave Renaldo her keys, she finally bought cat food and changed the litter, which proved that she could do it.

And then there was this. On the Fourth of July, after a party where the revelers got high to watch the fireworks from a roof garden in Tribeca, she’d shared a taxi back to Brooklyn with Portia’s married boyfriend—Portia being otherwise occupied—and kissed him when he dropped her off at her building, tongues involved, then hands under the clothes. He’s been emailing her ever since, and while she’s been emailing back, she’s managed to avoid seeing him again. So really, doesn’t this speak well of her?

—

It’s after midnight when she gets here: a bus to Torrington, then a taxi along miles of dark country roads. Inside, the house is hot and stuffy; she sets her bags down in the kitchen and goes around opening windows. On the counter, under the keys to the Subaru, she finds a note from Marian Hagerty that goes to the tune of You may go down the lane , whatever whatever, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. Lily is not to drink the wines in the cellar, each laid down by Joe to be opened at such and such a time. (“Not that you would, of course.”) She is not to have parties—“a friend or two is perfectly fine”—or overnight guests. If she uses the court, she is to wear only tennis shoes: i.e., bare-assed and breasts bouncing? Oh well, poor Marian. The once-scandalous second wife, suddenly in her sixties, bereft of her child and having to deal with Joe, now eighty-four and still playing doubles, with neighbors’ young wives as his partners.